How Obsession Helps and Hurts Path of Exile

According to Path of Exile, obsession can and will drive you mad if you let it.

By Adam Lancaster

The recent announcement of Diablo Immortal sent quakes of doubt, hesitation, and anger throughout much of the games community. Despite its best intentions, Blizzard’s initial news of a Diablo mobile game hit the ground with a thud, and the weeks it spent scrambling to salvage the situation didn't help matters. Disappointed and left without direction, many Diablo 3 players who were looking forward to a potential sequel instead looked elsewhere to get their ARPG fix, eventually finding solace in Path of Exile, with PoE’s community welcoming them with open arms.

Path of Exile is an online ARPG developed and published by New Zealand-based Grinding Gear Games, released on PC in 2013, ported to the Xbox One in 2017, with a PS4 release sometime early 2019. It features six character archetypes with an unlockable seventh, abundant skills with complex methods of enhancing or changing them, and an extensive and memetic skill tree that has amazed and scared newcomers for years. Its newest league, Betrayal, has players teaming up with new allies against a mysterious faction called the Immortal Syndicate.

If there's one thing Path of Exile teaches, it's that letting your obsessions rule you is a terrible idea with dire consequences.

The irony has not been lost on Path of Exile’s players.

Grinding Gear Games has gone on record saying the names of the league and its antagonists are coincidental and were picked prior to Blizzcon’s Diablo Immortal fiasco. Regardless, the community and the gaming sphere at large has run with the narrative that Path of Exile is picking up where Diablo 2 and 3 left off. GGG possesses a distinct design aesthetic and passion that has remained consistent over years of development time, with many proclaiming it as a true successor to gritty ARPGs of days past. It’s a well-trod story, familiar to veteran PoE players that have been around since beta. However, this time feels different distinctly because, aside from Torchlight Frontiers in early 2019, there is little competition coming down the pipe from other companies. As far as the ARPG space is concerned, Path of Exile rules the roost.

“Diablo exiles”, as they are called lovingly by the community, have perhaps learned a lesson about trust and obsession that will carry them well as they move forward into Wraeclast. If there’s one thing Path of Exile teaches, it’s that letting your obsessions rule you is a terrible idea with dire consequences.

A Game Built By Developers...and Fans

Path of Exile’s attractiveness is summed up on the Overview page on the game’s website. Several mission statements regarding its skill tree and skill gems, the bleak and brutal tone of Wraeclast as defiance against “bright, cartoony RPGs”, and the games’ deep commitment to the itemization of nearly everything under the sun give it a flavor that tastes distinctly of Diablo and other similar titles. GGG set out to make PoE a gritty, complicated experience from the outset when it was just a few developers working out of Chris Wilson’s garage, driven only by their love for ARPGs and desire to see a game heavily tailored towards the dedicated player.

Path of Exile has one of the most dedicated and obsessed gaming communities around.

This obsession is reflected in Path of Exile's story; dark magic, reawakened and maddened gods, scientists seeking immortality through human sacrifice, and the creation of eldritch artifacts through blood and death. Throughout it all, Path of Exile gives the impression that obsession, whether it be concerned with power and security, wealth and status, or lineage and history, can and will drive you mad if you let it.

It is interesting then, as Path of Exile has one of the most dedicated and obsessed game communities around. Part of that arose from necessity - its wiki, market tools, build crafting programs, all exist on some level because PoE is deliberately designed to obfuscate information that it doesn’t want its players having easy access to, which at the beginning of the Path of Exile's life was a draw for its player base. Having to discover this information was a foundation for community discussion and tool creation, theorycrafting and more. Trading was risky, clunky, and required a dedicated forum thread if you wanted to sell more than one item smoothly; movement was effectively capped by itemization limitations, and clearspeed, in general, was at a pace far slower than the game’s current average.

Ingenuity thrives under such limitations, and it wasn’t long until third party websites and software were developed by players to get around these barriers. Community-made websites and programs eased the pressures of trading under the developers’ constraints, and build planning tools allowed players degrees of control and fine-tuning of their characters well before they created them. Because of their customizability and frequent developer updates, these streamlining tools became extremely popular. Naturally, this sense of community passion rubbed off on new players.

Path of Exile shares a spotlight with games like Eve Online in that its reputation for laboriousness tends to precede it. The skill tree and gems aside, the main thing that shapes its reputation is its challenging nature. Monsters hit hard, defenses need to be multilayered for effectiveness at higher levels, and game knowledge is easily the most powerful weapon in the player’s toolkit. These mechanics were calculated to magnify the game’s dark tone. Even the player options used to be this way; for the longest time, group play was hampered by GGG’s insistence that dropped loot would either be a free for all affair or allocated to individual players for seconds at a time before becoming free for all. When players repeatedly asked for permanent allocation as an option, they eventually relented and made it available, but not before Chris Wilson called it one of their “biggest compromises”.

In whatever way the community and the developers butt heads, the most important and controversial of these frequently occurs over trade and its mechanics.

GGG's single-minded focus is partially to thank for the success of Path of Exile, as some players initially flocked to it several years ago as a reaction to Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House, and the third party tools used by the majority of the player base came out of a desire to work around the developer's ambitions. All of these design decisions coalesce into a product that reflects the attitudes at Grinding Gear Games, and continues to be extremely compelling for both the players and developers, but it also creates an atmosphere that puts those two groups against each other from time to time, butting heads and passions against each other to see who rules Wraeclast.

Like many games, it's also had its fair share of questionable mechanics. Snapshotting and double dipping, mechanics that relied on early PoE’s scripting and calculation formulas, were embraced by the early community before being phased out with new technology and bug fixes. In whatever way the community and the developers butt heads, the most important and controversial of these frequently occurs over trade and its mechanics.

Before the game’s itemization, skill tree, and skill gem systems are mentioned, the Overview page lists a “strong online item economy” as a feature. It is literally the first thing you’ll read about Path of Exile that isn’t the genre or setting, and this is deliberate on the part of Grinding Gear Games. There is no ‘gold’ currency in the game for players to spend. It is replaced instead by consumable currency orbs that serve as both crafting tools and barterable materials, backed by NPCs who carry several of the common ones at an unchanging market-baseline cost, and proliferated by players who feed and control the markets at large. Everything in the game, from difficulty to skill balance, to the accessibility and extent of rewards from new content, is filtered through this lens. Trading – that is, ease of trading, access to powerful & unique items, controlling the flow of currency for the player base – is the foundation of GGG’s balancing pyramid, the bedrock upon which everything stands.

GGG is obsessed with the idea that Path of Exile is first and foremost an economy-based game. The decision to exclude gold from the game was made well before open beta, and trading was supposed to carry risks. Solo Self-Found, a player-made playstyle that centered on finding and crafting your own gear, originated as a way for individuals to avoid having to deal with the trouble of trading with others. It was small peanuts until it was finally integrated into PoE in 2017, several years after launch, and the game is explicitly not balanced around it.

The Xbox One announcement served as a foreboding portent for the future, and in fact could be compared to Diablo Immortal's announcement when it comes to community outcry.

The biggest sign of GGG’s obsession with Path of Exile’s economy-based focus is the fact that they have absolutely refused to have an Auction House or automated trading present anywhere in the game. According to its philosophy, if trading is too easy, loot becomes worthless, and the game is unplayable. While this is a bold idea, it is one that GGG believes to be true, because trading is always in consideration with everything they make. As a result, new content in Path of Exile often comes with the burden of caveats. It can’t be too rewarding without being difficult to access. Yet it can’t be too difficult to access, or no one will play it. The fear of “inflation”, currency based or otherwise, is so dire that to hear Chris Wilson speak about it, they’ve given far too much ground already.

GGG’s devotion towards stressing Wraeclast as arduous to survive runs through all aspects of PoE’s design, but none more so than trade, and as a result, economic controversies are the meat and potatoes of PoE drama. In 2015, a small group of well known and wealthy players discovered a crafting method that they then kept to themselves in order to corner the market on a certain bow type, in an event the community calls “Mirrorgate”. Relying on massive demand, very minimal knowledge of the recipe, a homemade crawler that worked faster than trade websites did, and efforts to mislead the community on Reddit by proclaiming the crafting process wasn’t possible (efforts which were given legitimacy by a developer commenting and then retracting incorrect information), they had amassed wealth beyond measure. The group ultimately had a falling out, the information was posted online in bits and pieces, but since none of the crafting, market, or community endeavors were against the Terms of Service, none of them were banned.

In the same vein, Legacy League in early 2017 had massive outcries from community members who found out about an exploit that had been used to infinitely replicate the league mechanic, bypassing the material cost and potentially torpedoing the market - until Chris Wilson stepped in and explained that the exploit was contained, people who did it were banned, and that the hysteria of the subreddit and forums had potentially damaged the league’s reputation far worse than the exploit itself.

The community’s reaction then, misplaced as it was, makes more sense in a world where just a few months prior, they were rocked by the announcement of an Xbox One port.

The Problem With Panic

Players were aghast at their money being used to develop an "inferior quality" version of the game, one that they speculated would take dev time and energy away from their "true" version.

The Xbox One announcement served as a foreboding portent for the future, and in fact could be compared to Diablo Immortal’s announcement when it comes to community outcry. Path of Exile’s intracommunity drama is normally wrapped up within a couple of weeks, contained to the circumstances that created it. However, when specters of the larger gaming community and industry come by with reminders that they exist, panic abounds. It became a community issue primarily because it was a sign that the game they knew was fleeting. The reaction was largely one of terror, anger, and confusion. Players even used their fears as justification to retroactively explain away balance decisions and changes in the game they didn’t like. In their minds, doing this was the only thing that made everything click.

Players were aghast at their money being used to develop an “inferior quality” version of the game, one that they speculated would take dev time and energy away from their “true” version. All was accompanied by an overwhelming atmosphere that eventually, this would be the death of the game, that Path of Exile, as they knew it, had entered a terminal state. GGG going on record saying that they hired new people to handle the game’s port, and that it helped their development cycle for the PC version didn’t help matters either; if anything, it bolstered the fear that the console port had somehow corrupted development of the game.

It’s been nearly 2 years since that announcement. Path of Exile is still updating, and the vast majority of these people are still playing it. The impact of the port is, in large part, unnoticeable for PC players, and the update cadence has remained unchanged. But the players themselves have changed. They too are denizens of Wraeclast, and they too cannot escape the albatross of cataclysm. When an object of obsession is put at risk, trepidation finds solace in the heart, declaring itself lord of the domain.

And lo, we come to the precipice.

The Future

Grinding Gear Games, as of May 20th, 2018, has privately sold 80% of its shares to Tencent, the premier Chinese gaming company worth nearly half a trillion dollars. This news, like the Xbox announcement, came out of left field for the community, who reacted to it as though fear never left their hearts. Accusations of selling out, alarming declarations that the end was nigh, dread that the game they loved was dead and gone, much of it old hat. This cataclysm however, was new. The Xbox port was a mirrored version of the same discussion in many other PC gaming communities, and thus the zeitgeist recovered soon enough. The Tencent acquisition opened the exiles of Wraeclast up to serious questions that many hadn’t considered before: “Do I want to support this massive gaming conglomerate? Is Tencent getting a piece of the money I’m putting into the game? Is GGG still worth supporting, now that they’ve been bought out?”

All great games accomplish the feat of imbuing some piece of themselves into our lives. If there's one thing Path of Exile has done in the process, it's teaching desire to its players, and fear of losing that desire.

Grinding Gear Games isn’t suddenly swimming in money and resources because of the buyout, no matter how many expensive Magic the Gathering cards Chris Wilson now owns because of it. Path of Exile had been published in China under Tencent’s big top for well over a year before the acquisition, and the game had received significant regional changes because of the market and laws there. Despite this, there are new expectations in the community; questioning GGG’s trade ideology temporarily took a backseat to more prevalent concerns with the prices of their microtransactions and the speed and quality of content releases. “Thanks Tencent” became a meme shortly after the news hit, used by community members and players to refer to the quality of life enhancements, balance changes that were seen as beneficial for the game at large, or sarcastically when discussing something about the game they didn’t like. It captures the sardonic and fervid obsessions the players of Path of Exile have for the game, but also betrays the complete lack of consumer understanding of business. Company acquisitions take place all the time, and their effects are not guaranteed to be negative for the end user. But they were afraid nevertheless.

And why wouldn't they be? Their obsession is at risk, and Wraeclast has trained them to recognize that and fear its terrible power. Wraeclast is carried with us, a part of ourselves. All great games accomplish the feat of imbuing some piece of themselves into our lives. If there’s one thing Path of Exile has done in the process, it’s teaching desire to its players, and fear of losing that desire, leaving them only embraced by misery. But it can also teach perseverance, that which divides the conqueror from the conquered.

I think, ultimately, that players could learn a thing or two from their new Diablo exile community members. Faced with the loss of experiences they held dear, they looked forward and found something new to cherish in the ashes of disappointment. By discovering a place that is different but familiar, and being broken out of the cycle of obsession by the very thing they were obsessed over, they can potentially bring a new paradigm to PoE’s community that may be just what we need.

They persevere. There’s a lesson in that, I think.

Adam Lancaster is a writer and graphic designer from Houston who is madly in love with media writing and criticism. You can check out his blog at Apocrypha Scribe and find him on Twitter.